5 ms·

Not sure about the marketing swaying people these days. People are going for the easiest devices to use that get out of the way and are high quality.

kristianc 7y ago
Which I guess would explain why there are Android phones that crush the iPhone on tech specs but make a minuscule (and sometimes negative) proportion of the industry’s profit?
- stefanfisk 7y ago
  crush is a strong word here, which Android phones would that be referring to? I got bored after they released the X, but at least up to and including that generation iPhones dominated benchmarks while at least being top 3 in photo quality.
- jedberg 7y ago
  At this point no matter how amazing the Android is, I would find the iPhone easier. I've been using an iPhone for so long it's just second nature. At one point I was forced to use an Android for a month. I could just never get used to the interface.
  - kristianc 7y ago
    You find the iPhone easy to use because the iPhone is easy to use and more or less consistent in every iPhone device you’ve used. A five year old can use an iPhone. That’s competitive differentiation, which is very much part of marketing. An iPhone isn’t easy to use in the same way that git is easier to use than svn for someone who has been using git for a decade.
    - swozey 7y ago
      When I had my six month affair with an Iphone 6 it took me a month (I don't get many calls) to finally get frustrated enough to google "How to reject calls" because I was so used to Android giving me a big red X that I never even considered pushing the power button to reject a call (I think that even just mutes incoming calls on Android, I forget), that X let me mute or reject based on the direction I swiped it. I could only figure out how to mute the rings which means my car radio would just be silent until the caller finally gave up. I know a lot of iphone users think it's the most intuitive machine in the world and a 5 year old can get it, and I'm obviously heavily swayed by my decade or whatever with Android but the amount of hidden/unintuitive-to-me/impossible-to-do things I found was what moved me back to Android after that trial. I spent a LOT of time searching on Google for how to do things with that phone.
  - vinay427 7y ago
    It's actually quite remarkable to me that I can have such a different experience as a longtime Android device user and both of these experiences can coexist. I could never go back to the iPhone interface, and every time I have to use someone else's phone I'm always astounded at how hidden away the (few) options still available to me seem.
    - heavyset_go 7y ago
      Discoverability of UI features is atrocious on iOS.
      - asdff 7y ago
        It really is. I don't know where anything is in the settings submenus anymore.
  - mhh__ 7y ago
    Really? In my view it's just a phone, just use whatever you prefer but I can't relate to getting used to an interface as per se
    - jedberg 7y ago
      It’s muscle memory. Imagine how inefficient you’d be if someone moved the vowels to a different spot on your keyboard. While both keyboards are nearly the same, everything you type would be wrong for quite a while.
      - mhh__ 7y ago
        Is it though? Ignoring the fun stuff, I just email, read (datasheets and text)books (i.e. PDFs and phone people on my phone - how much muscle memory is there in the first place? Unless you mean the wider ecosystem, in which case I agree.
- factotvm 7y ago
  No one is crushing anyone in the phone market. They leap frog each other from time to time, but to the average consumer there is little difference between the flagship phones.
- cromwellian 7y ago
  It’s simple to explain in the same way that Apple even in the 90s made the most profit of any personal computer manufacturer even though PCs clearly had superior hardware and much more software. The answer is monopoly pricing vs competition. Apple is the only iOS manufacturer, just like they were the only MacOS Manufacturer (excepting the brief period of Mac clones) That means all Android manufacturers compete and split their market driving down prices and margins and divvying up market share. You saw the same thing in PCs when they were almost sold at cost or razor thin margins because they were commodified: a pc from dell vs hp vs compaq vs gazillion other vendors was basically the same experience.
  - kristianc 7y ago
    > The answer is monopoly pricing vs competition. Apple is the only iOS manufacturer, just like they were the only MacOS Manufacturer (excepting the brief period of Mac clones) I don’t disagree with this, but it only matters at all because iOS (and access to its user interface, Safari, lock in on iMessages) is a distinct value add. BlackBerry also had a monopoly on their OS as did Palm as did Nokia. None of them exist anymore.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > there are Android phones that crush the iPhone on tech specs This is largely not true anymore. (In fact, in certain areas it would be appropriate to say that it's iPhone doing the "crushing".)
- Grazester 7y ago
  I am like you but with the Android. Every time I use my wife iPhone I want to toss it across the room. I think primary because it doesn't have a dedicated back button.
  - htfu 7y ago
    You mean "swipe in from left of screen"? Sure it might only apply 80-90% of the time but I'd say that's about on par with the back button behaving like I expect it to..
  - hk__2 7y ago
    > I think primary because it doesn't have a dedicated back button. Why is this an issue? Do you need dedicated back and forward buttons to browse through your pictures? Of course not, you just swipe left and right. That’s how the iPhone handles the “back” movement.
    - doliveira 7y ago
      Back as in "go back to the previous screen".
    - mhh__ 7y ago
      The musician in me makes me yearn for a "physical" button
    - Grazester 7y ago
      facepalm I just clicked on an album in "Photos", I could scroll through them swiping left and right to go through the photos but now I have to rely on the arrow at the top left of the screen to go back to view all albums. I like having a back button always present on the buttom of my screen in Android for this.
      - snypox 7y ago
        Of course you don’t need to reach that far, my fingers are not even that long. Grab the middle of the photo with one finger and swipe down. Most (all?) navigations on iOS are swipe based. On another note, if I’m being honest I still miss the “main” button of iPhone after using iPhone 11 since it came out (3months).
- filoleg 7y ago
  Actual specs don’t mean much with phones, I learned. Somehow my old Galaxy S8+, that had specs crushing iPhones on paper, after just a few months of use, would be way choppier and slower to use than an iPhone 7, which was both older and had way worse specs. And mind you, i am not the kind of person who installs tons of random apps and runs them in the background all the time.
  - swozey 7y ago
    That seems odd, you reset it after encountering that? I still have an S8 in my drawer but upgraded to the S10 when it came out last year and I honestly can barely tell the difference in their performance (I don't really mobile game so no idea there). I was actually really disappointed that it didn't feel like I'd just upgraded to a new model Corvette but felt like I got a car wash, which is how I'm sure all my phone upgrades will feel after the S7 now. I had a big performance problem on my s7 way after putting in a high speed SDcard that apparently was corrupted or damaged. I was only, as far as I know, who knows what Android was storing on it, putting podcasts/images on it and it still brought my entire OS to its knees until I removed it. That was a huge trial in my Android loyalty because I went months with this incredibly slow phone until I finally was packing it up to sell, remembered "oh I don't want the buyer to have my SDcard!" pulled it out and it felt like a new phone again, I got another 2-3 years out of it. Eventually tossed it at the ground on accident thus the s8..
    - filoleg 7y ago
      Yep, I tried full reset without restoring from backup. After a few months, it got back to the choppy and sloppy level of performance again, not even mentioning battery lasting a bit less than a day. Which was a dealbreaker to me, since dealing with battery anxiety is not fun. My current phone easily lasts me 1.5 days without charging, so even with very heavy usage, I am never worried that it won't last me through a full day.
- mikestew 7y ago
  A monster V8 engine with a stiff clutch in a lightweight chassis isn’t much use if it’s undrivable by the majority of the population. Honda sells a lot of Civics, not so many track cars.

kristianc 7y ago

Which I guess would explain why there are Android phones that crush the iPhone on tech specs but make a minuscule (and sometimes negative) proportion of the industry’s profit?

stefanfisk 7y ago
crush is a strong word here, which Android phones would that be referring to? I got bored after they released the X, but at least up to and including that generation iPhones dominated benchmarks while at least being top 3 in photo quality.
jedberg 7y ago
At this point no matter how amazing the Android is, I would find the iPhone easier. I've been using an iPhone for so long it's just second nature. At one point I was forced to use an Android for a month. I could just never get used to the interface.
- kristianc 7y ago
  You find the iPhone easy to use because the iPhone is easy to use and more or less consistent in every iPhone device you’ve used. A five year old can use an iPhone. That’s competitive differentiation, which is very much part of marketing. An iPhone isn’t easy to use in the same way that git is easier to use than svn for someone who has been using git for a decade.
  - swozey 7y ago
    When I had my six month affair with an Iphone 6 it took me a month (I don't get many calls) to finally get frustrated enough to google "How to reject calls" because I was so used to Android giving me a big red X that I never even considered pushing the power button to reject a call (I think that even just mutes incoming calls on Android, I forget), that X let me mute or reject based on the direction I swiped it. I could only figure out how to mute the rings which means my car radio would just be silent until the caller finally gave up. I know a lot of iphone users think it's the most intuitive machine in the world and a 5 year old can get it, and I'm obviously heavily swayed by my decade or whatever with Android but the amount of hidden/unintuitive-to-me/impossible-to-do things I found was what moved me back to Android after that trial. I spent a LOT of time searching on Google for how to do things with that phone.
- vinay427 7y ago
  It's actually quite remarkable to me that I can have such a different experience as a longtime Android device user and both of these experiences can coexist. I could never go back to the iPhone interface, and every time I have to use someone else's phone I'm always astounded at how hidden away the (few) options still available to me seem.
  - heavyset_go 7y ago
    Discoverability of UI features is atrocious on iOS.
    - asdff 7y ago
      It really is. I don't know where anything is in the settings submenus anymore.
- mhh__ 7y ago
  Really? In my view it's just a phone, just use whatever you prefer but I can't relate to getting used to an interface as per se
  - jedberg 7y ago
    It’s muscle memory. Imagine how inefficient you’d be if someone moved the vowels to a different spot on your keyboard. While both keyboards are nearly the same, everything you type would be wrong for quite a while.
    - mhh__ 7y ago
      Is it though? Ignoring the fun stuff, I just email, read (datasheets and text)books (i.e. PDFs and phone people on my phone - how much muscle memory is there in the first place? Unless you mean the wider ecosystem, in which case I agree.
factotvm 7y ago
No one is crushing anyone in the phone market. They leap frog each other from time to time, but to the average consumer there is little difference between the flagship phones.
cromwellian 7y ago
It’s simple to explain in the same way that Apple even in the 90s made the most profit of any personal computer manufacturer even though PCs clearly had superior hardware and much more software. The answer is monopoly pricing vs competition. Apple is the only iOS manufacturer, just like they were the only MacOS Manufacturer (excepting the brief period of Mac clones) That means all Android manufacturers compete and split their market driving down prices and margins and divvying up market share. You saw the same thing in PCs when they were almost sold at cost or razor thin margins because they were commodified: a pc from dell vs hp vs compaq vs gazillion other vendors was basically the same experience.
- kristianc 7y ago
  > The answer is monopoly pricing vs competition. Apple is the only iOS manufacturer, just like they were the only MacOS Manufacturer (excepting the brief period of Mac clones) I don’t disagree with this, but it only matters at all because iOS (and access to its user interface, Safari, lock in on iMessages) is a distinct value add. BlackBerry also had a monopoly on their OS as did Palm as did Nokia. None of them exist anymore.
saagarjha 7y ago
> there are Android phones that crush the iPhone on tech specs This is largely not true anymore. (In fact, in certain areas it would be appropriate to say that it's iPhone doing the "crushing".)
Grazester 7y ago
I am like you but with the Android. Every time I use my wife iPhone I want to toss it across the room. I think primary because it doesn't have a dedicated back button.
- htfu 7y ago
  You mean "swipe in from left of screen"? Sure it might only apply 80-90% of the time but I'd say that's about on par with the back button behaving like I expect it to..
- hk__2 7y ago
  > I think primary because it doesn't have a dedicated back button. Why is this an issue? Do you need dedicated back and forward buttons to browse through your pictures? Of course not, you just swipe left and right. That’s how the iPhone handles the “back” movement.
  - doliveira 7y ago
    Back as in "go back to the previous screen".
  - mhh__ 7y ago
    The musician in me makes me yearn for a "physical" button
  - Grazester 7y ago
    facepalm I just clicked on an album in "Photos", I could scroll through them swiping left and right to go through the photos but now I have to rely on the arrow at the top left of the screen to go back to view all albums. I like having a back button always present on the buttom of my screen in Android for this.
    - snypox 7y ago
      Of course you don’t need to reach that far, my fingers are not even that long. Grab the middle of the photo with one finger and swipe down. Most (all?) navigations on iOS are swipe based. On another note, if I’m being honest I still miss the “main” button of iPhone after using iPhone 11 since it came out (3months).
filoleg 7y ago
Actual specs don’t mean much with phones, I learned. Somehow my old Galaxy S8+, that had specs crushing iPhones on paper, after just a few months of use, would be way choppier and slower to use than an iPhone 7, which was both older and had way worse specs. And mind you, i am not the kind of person who installs tons of random apps and runs them in the background all the time.
- swozey 7y ago
  That seems odd, you reset it after encountering that? I still have an S8 in my drawer but upgraded to the S10 when it came out last year and I honestly can barely tell the difference in their performance (I don't really mobile game so no idea there). I was actually really disappointed that it didn't feel like I'd just upgraded to a new model Corvette but felt like I got a car wash, which is how I'm sure all my phone upgrades will feel after the S7 now. I had a big performance problem on my s7 way after putting in a high speed SDcard that apparently was corrupted or damaged. I was only, as far as I know, who knows what Android was storing on it, putting podcasts/images on it and it still brought my entire OS to its knees until I removed it. That was a huge trial in my Android loyalty because I went months with this incredibly slow phone until I finally was packing it up to sell, remembered "oh I don't want the buyer to have my SDcard!" pulled it out and it felt like a new phone again, I got another 2-3 years out of it. Eventually tossed it at the ground on accident thus the s8..
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Yep, I tried full reset without restoring from backup. After a few months, it got back to the choppy and sloppy level of performance again, not even mentioning battery lasting a bit less than a day. Which was a dealbreaker to me, since dealing with battery anxiety is not fun. My current phone easily lasts me 1.5 days without charging, so even with very heavy usage, I am never worried that it won't last me through a full day.
mikestew 7y ago
A monster V8 engine with a stiff clutch in a lightweight chassis isn’t much use if it’s undrivable by the majority of the population. Honda sells a lot of Civics, not so many track cars.